The Ghosts of Sohma House
by zopponde
Summary: Haruka Sohma is new to high school, and it seems anything but normal.  The fanclub of a guy fifteen years dead is still running, a Yankee of the same last name follows her everywhere with more family, and Haruka's seeing...wait, isn't he dead?
1. Prologue

**A/n:** Random posting...frenzy. Too bad this site's only for fanfiction. I wrote an original story once, that overall pretty much sucks I guess, but I still like it a bunch, because...meh. Classics, or something. I've been on a really spontaneous posting frenzy, so...yeah.

In case you don't already know, this is set...like, people started dying the moment Tohru met them, and this is something like a decade and a half after that. More explanation later. Maybe...yeah. It made more sense in my mind, probably.

Additionally: No. It's not OCxHatori. Someone thought that, but no. It's not...really, the age difference is...just, no. Please keep in mind that this is set in the reasonably distant future. Where none of the other people are alive. Except Hatori lives long enough for a flashback.

Should it matter to anyone, this is the first story that I posted on the internet (other site). So...yeah. I was not quite so very experienced, please do not be too hard on me. I've barely given it a conscious thought since, I don't know...May? Don't give me lip about my mistakes from such a long time ago.

**Warnings: **OCs, no doubt some language, bad parenting, really long chapters (later), and I'm probably forgetting something else. Oh yeah. Bad parenting. Which, by the way, was not particularly inspired by my own.

**Disclaimer: **I own only my OC, Haruka, and her immediate family. Wait...okay, no, I own most people there. I think you'll be able to tell who is mine and who is not.

* * *

Haruka Sohma almost still remembered. Barely. In the back of her mind, mistaken for a realistic dream from when she was about five years old, she remembered her orange-haired sister. She remembered the monster that her mother rejected, the monster that seemed almost to divide the family between the parents and the children. She remembered her sister, but only as a dream.

More than the dream, she remembered waking up in her house, with her parents smiling strangely, as though nothing bad had happened at all. Haruka couldn't quite accept that; the dream seemed far too realistic to be anything but reality. She confessed her dream to her parents, partially out of hope brought on the myth that telling people about your dreams keeps them from coming true. She couldn't allow herself to think that her parents were so cruel that when they had a daughter who sometimes turned into a cat, they practically threw her onto the streets.

Her parents listened, looked at Haruka strangely, and dismissed the dream as just that - a dream. Nothing more. Not even a possibility. They said that if they did have a daughter like that, they'd hold her closely and give her all the care and possitive attention that she needed.

Haruka didn't think she believed them, because the dream was just too real. It couldn't possibly have been inspired by absolutely nothing.

A few months later, Haruka fell ill. Her parents took her to the doctor - a doctor in the Sohma family, who only worked for the Sohma family, named Hatori. Having been as young as she was, she was almost scared of him at first, but when he helped her recover from being sick, she knew that he wasn't so bad.

The strangest thing about Hatori was that when she saw him, Haruka immediately thought of the dream about her sister. No person even vaguely like him ever appeared in her memories of the dream, but, oddly enough, whenever she saw him, all that she could think about was the dream and the mysteries behind it.

Haruka, as a small child, truly believed that there was something strange about her family. Hatori made her think of a dream about a sister, and, though she forgot about the incident within a few years, she did remember seeing a girl who strangely resembled the sister from her dream in Hatori's house.

As soon as the girl saw Haruka looking at her, her eyes widened with fear for the split second between when Haruka saw her and when she ducked away and then made a certain amount of noise running away.

Haruka never really thought about the girl after that. A few times, a wistful idea came into her head that the girl was the sister that Haruka had dreamed about, and that the girl was going to join the family, but soon enough, Haruka forgot completely about the girl. She always remembered the dream, but never the girl. Even when Hatori told her, years later, that she could find a good friend in an orange-haired Sohma girl, Haruka thought only of the dream, and not of the girl, and when she met the very same girl, she thought only of Hatori's words and the dream.

* * *


	2. Chapter 1

**A/n:** Ummm...wow. I haven't posted on this story in a while.  
...that's almost all there is to say...

With the new year, I've been thinking of the old fanfics of mine. What I Regret, Ghosts of Sohma House--heck, I've even been thinking of going back to writing that pseudo-fanfic I wrote for NaNo '06!  
...each of which feature, respectively, Haruka1.2, Haruka1.1, and Haruka1.0  
Maybe I'm just trying to make up for not having written anything Haruka v.1 for a while.

Please allow me to take the time to point out the randomness of my mind. None of this was inspired by a true story, just my strange imagination.  
I.E., Haruka's mother is not based on my mother.  
...yeah. My problems with my mother are absolutely different from those in this particular segment of the Sohma family.

**Warnings** were posted last chapter, so I'm not going to bother writing them out again.

**Disclaimer:** I own Haruka, whathisface Haruka's little brother Noburo (took me long enough), or Haruka's hey-I-don't-have-to-look-up-these-characters'-names-because-they-don't-have-any (I should probably change that) parents. Otherwise, credit goes to that lady whose name I forgot and who wrote Fruits Basket.

* * *

Chapter 1

Haruka Sohma stepped outside her house and sneezed. The day was hardly cold, but the sun was bright and she was still half-asleep. _The first day's the hardest_, she thought to herself as she turned and began walking down the sidewalk to her new school. _Here's hoping that high school doesn't suck as much as middle school._

The high school was officially known as Kaibara High School, but in the Sohma family, it was known as Sohma High; it had once been "ruled" by the "prince" Yuki Sohma, and about five more Sohmas went there at some point in time, too. Of course, all that was long-past history; Yuki Sohma was at least fifteen years dead, and the Sohmas that he associated with passed away, too, from a year before him to ten years after his death.

Haruka yawned. _Sohma High must be some crazy place_, she thought. _We Sohmas don't really seem very normal, and if one of us was a student body president that we still remember today, then this school almost definitely has some problem or another._  
One way or another, she figured, something won't go right today. I know an omen when I see one, she reasoned, looking down at her shirt.

Haruka firmly believed that her father was either stupid or crazy (or maybe just ignorant), and her mother was at least as stupid or crazy (probably crazy, or a combination of both). Her mother bought Haruka's high school clothes about halfway through her middle school years. Somehow, she predicted Haruka's size perfectly, and the clothes fit amazingly well.

Her mother obsessively washed those uniforms. Every Sunday night was Wash Haruka's High School Uniforms Day. Just like Saturday was Wash Haruka's Middle School Uniforms Day, and Friday was Wash Haruka's Elementary School Clothes Day. Amazingly, each and every one of those traditions remained even with Haruka beginning high school. Only Sunday truly mattered, though; that's when her mother did what made Haruka's uniform shirt so different.

Her mother last washed Haruka's shirts on the last possible day before school, and brought her baby brother Noburu with her, expecting him to be the best possible laundry assistant at eighteen months old.

He wasn't. He ripped the collar off of the shirts and tried to eat them. He actually did eat some parts of some of them, but the results...well, it might be best to leave it saying that Haruka was glad that her mother took care of that part of the fiasco.

Haruka was still left with each and every one of the uniforms that her mother bought so long in advance without the sailor collar that Noburu ripped off.

The thing about sailor collars (or at least the ones that Kaibara High used) is that they had incredibly low cuts before the collar is added. The collar solved that problem, but with it being removed, nobody in their right mind would wear that to school to save their life, for a very long list of reasons, beginning with the fact that it probably would, somehow or another, not prove very successful in saving a person's life.

Naturally, Haruka was furious when she tried to put one on. She screamed at her mother loudly enough for the neighbors to knock on their door and ask them strenuously politely to please keep the noise down, or they would call the police.

Haruka's mother insisted that if Haruka should be mad at anyone, it was most definitely Noburu. This was most definitely her mother's insanity; Noburu had never even seen anyone fold clothes, and even if he had, Haruka sincerely doubted that any child, let alone a normal one like Noburu, would fold clothes perfectly after seeing his mother do it once.

Her mother proved to be completely unable to help. She absolutely refused to buy new clothes for Haruka, because "You shouldn't buy something that you already have the exact same thing of already." She also refused to sew them back together, as she hadn't done anything to harm the shirts (or so she said), and furthermore, she did not know how to sew. Also, it was a "waste of money" to take it to the clothing repair shop and have it fixed there. The only person who should fix them, according to Haruka's mother, was Noburu, because he ruined them, so he may as well put them back together, and if Haruka refused to make Noburu fix her shirts, then nobody else should do the job other than Haruka, because she was the only other person who could possibly renew her shirts.

If only she had an allowance, Haruka would have taken the shirts to the repair shop herself, but her parents were such penny-pinchers that she hadn't a cent in her own name; all of it was to her parents, and all of it was paid by the Sohma Family Main House, for some reason that even her parents wouldn't tell (probably because they didn't know it themselves).

Thus, Haruka saw no option other than repairing the shirts for herself. She made many attempts with many different supposed solutions, but only her final solution to the problem worked.

Supposed Solution Number One:

Her parents had a sewing machine, and those were supposed to sew in straight lines without much guidance, so Haruka dug theirs out and, since her brother had only eaten off parts of one or two of the collars, most could be repaired, and most was all she needed to survive high school. And if they weren't, then maybe it would show her mother reason and she'd have enough so that she actually could.

The First Problem with the First Proposed Solution: Noburu wasn't the only one who ruined shirt collars; Haruka, in her blind rage at her mother's idiocy/insanity, had torn most of the intact collars to pieces.

The Second Problem with the First Idea: Haruka found only black thread. This didn't really pose too much of a problem at first, but it definitely worsened most of the other problems.

The Third Problem: Haruka actually tried to use a sewing machine without any previous knowledge of how it worked. Somehow, the sewing machine actually tore both the one intact collar and the shirt to shreds.

The Fourth Problem: Haruka forgot that she needed to sew between the front and back halves of her school uniform, and not sew the back half to the front half to the collar. She tried to cut the front and back apart, but that also made the front separate from the collar. In frustration, she accidentally tore the front half of the shirt in half, and the shirt was now wide open. When she tried to fix that, not only did the shirt then have a long black line bisecting the front, but also the cloth had to be overlapped for Haruka to be able to sew it. Her shirt became too small horizantally, and the collar didn't fit the giant V of the neck.

The Fifth Problem: Haruka discovered a slight problem with her lead foot. She sewed too fast, couldn't stop, and ended up having a black line spiraling uselessly down her shirt. She cursed her parents' choice in thread color and took out the seamripper to remove the thread. She discovered that the seamripper only worked on seams, not useless threads, when it tore a fairly short line that only vaguely followed the spiral down. She cursed very loudly and added even more loudly, "Noburu-kun, please, never, ever repeat that word! Please forget that your older sister ever said that!" because he no doubt did hear her say it, and the word wasn't one that a child of his youth should know. After deciding that she'd do five good deeds to make up for her fowl language, she tried to cut the thread and pull it out normally, but when the black thread was pulled, the blue ones in the uniform cloth followed, warping the shirt's shape so horribly that she wished that she'd never even thought of using the sewing machine.

Supposed Solution Number Two:

Using the sewing machine without using the sewing machine: sewing the shirts together the old-fashioned way, by hand, with thread and needle, and no machine of any kind. If there was no other advantage, then at least Haruka wouldn't need overlap, and therefore, size would probably not warped too badly for her to at least fix it well enough to plea to whoever might be able to help her get a new shirt.

Problem Number One with Solution Number Two: She still only had black thread. By now, each and every one of the collars was in multiple pieces, so the first that she tried to repair had a black spiderweb crisscrossing it. Her mother saw it and cried out in horror and proclaimed (quite loudly, and directly into Haruka's ear) that she wouldn't allow her daughter to be seen in such wretched refuse! (or something like that.) Haruka pointed out that she would need money for white thread to be seen in anything else, and her mother hesitantly gave her just enough money to buy the thread (with a very small amount a leniency from the cashier). She arrived home uncomfortably close to sunset, and had to give up on the concept of repairing the shirts overnight. Fortunately, she had one more day to find a solution.

The Second Problem: Time. It took her from about five in the morning to lunch at noon for her to sew one collar back into one piece. She figured that she shouldn't think about the other shirts, that she should only focus on having enough clothes for her to survive school long enough to beg for a better shirt and fix the rest later. This didn't prove to be much of a problem but might have caused enough pressure for her to rush into the other problems.

The Third Problem: Either the sewing maching used a little less thread for length or Haruka's spool of white thread was smaller than the spool of black thread that she tried to use for the machine. She ran out of white thread as she finished her first shirt, and had to use some of the black thread to sew the collar to an intact and usable shirt.

The Fourth Problem: Haruka didn't sew the collar on correctly. She sewed it on such that the black thread showed, and, with it, the seam along which her brother had removed the collar. Her mother saw it and shrieked, "I will not allow my daughter to be seen even by her own mother in such huddled masses from your teeming shore!" Haruka slowly stood up, walked around her mother, and ran to her father, begging him to agree with her that her mother was completely insane. He countered, saying that her mind was only on the book she was reading. It was about some Italian immigrants going to America and reading a poem that was engraved below a statue. "Huddled masses", "teeming shore", and even "wretched refuse" were all phrases in the poem, but her mother had mixed different phrases from different lines. "She's still crazy," Haruka pouted to her father. "And you still have a right to believe that," her father agreed. "But that doesn't change the fact that she isn't." Haruka stormed back to her room and carefully pulled out the black thread, carefully cutting it at every loop this time. It was probably a waste of thread, but Haruka figured that there wasn't anything else she could do.

The Fifth Problem: She tried to sew it slightly differently, as though she were sewing it inside-out with the collar inside, thinking that it could fold out and work. The problem came up when the collar refused to stay folded neatly on her chest and instead stuck up or just stayed folded in.

The Sixth Problem: Haruka tried ironing it down. Noburu crawled into the room and lifted the end opposite the iron as it heated, and the hot iron tipped over onto Haruka's foot. She cursed several times in every single language that she knew, using the most fowl words and at some point even claiming that she would devour the iron's soul. She decided that she would have to do about ninety-five food deeds to make up for those curses, and that added to her original five totaled up to a hundred good deeds to do. Holding ice to her foot, Haruka tried to think of what good deeds she could do to pay her one hundred off. She couldn't think of three, and while she supposed that she could do those enough times to enough people over enough times to total a hundred, she wasn't sure if doing the same good deed thirty-three times counted all thirty-three times, and she didn't want to have to constantly be on the lookout for the right opportunities to come along, so she completely ditched the concept of making up for cursing with good deeds, along with all ideas of repairing her uniforms with needle and thread. Time flew too fast, and the sun was gradually reaching the point where it was going to start falling to the point where it was sort of considered to be sinking.

Supposed Solution Number Three:

Some veterinarians used things that looked and worked kind of like staples instead of stiches for certain kinds of cuts and stuff on dogs, right?

Problem Number One and Only: Her house only had one stapler in it. It was barely large enough to put a single staple into her clothes. And it was out of staples.

Supposed Solution Number Four:

In America, it's said that duct tape makes the world go round, so why can't it fix her uniforms?

Problem: No duct tape. Her parents wouldn't let her borrow any money for duct tape. Her mother told her that the reason was because she wouldn't allow her daughter to be seen "wearing anything that might possibly resemble the tired, the poor, tempest-tost to me, that would no doubt be created by your trying something so insanely idiotic." The two words seemed very familiar to Haruka. _Oh, that's right_, she remembered, _those are the two words that I use to describe her._

Supposed Solution Number Five:

Clear tape?

Problem: It didn't stick well enough.

Haruka was exhausted. School started in about twelve hours, and if she was smart, she'd spend those eating supper, making sure everything was ready for the first day, and sleeping. She stood in her room by the closed door and was about to start pounding her head into it when it hit her — the door, that is. Her mother opened the door and it hit her in the forehead. Haruka sank her throbbing head into her hands.

"Owwww," she moaned in pain.

"Huh?" Her mother hadn't expected Haruka to be waiting so close to the door. "Oh, I'm sorry, Haruka-san..." Haruka's mother was definitely insane. She didn't know a soul in the universe after herself whose mother called her name with –san.

"Thank you for knocking, Kaa-san," Haruka hissed sarcastically through gritted teeth.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know you were..." her mother paused. "What are you doing?"

"Trying to think of some way to wear an actual school uniform to school tomorrow," Haruka sort-of lied. She would have been doing that if she hadn't run out of ideas.

"Well, I'm not going to buy the same thing twice," her mother reminded Haruka. "And besides, the same exact thing would happen again, anyway. Why bother getting the same exact thing, when the same exact problem will happen again?"

Haruka paused at her mother's words. "Okaa-san," she said, regaining her posture, "there just might be some chance for you to actually be sane. So, please, may I borrow enough money for a...new school uniform?" She tried to make it sound more like it was a new style.

"No, they'll just be ripped apart again," her mother huffed.

"No, they're completely different from these ones," Haruka persuaded. "I'm not sure that Noburu-kun would do anything to these, and even if he did, I'd still be...decent."

That convinced Haruka's mother. Haruka was free to go and get herself some intact school uniforms, even if they wouldn't really be the right ones. Amazingly, when she came down the stairs in the morning and greeted her mother, she didn't even seem to notice the difference. She just sat at the table, sipping her coffee. She looked up and said, "Oh, you're off already? Have fun, and don't forget to make some friends! Make good impressions on your teachers!"

Haruka's mother never realized that Haruka was wearing the shirt for the boys' uniform.

The skirt was the same, but Haruka noted that she would want to try to get it black instead of blue, in the future. The shirt was blue with a grayish-silverish piping and a tie of the same color, and Haruka had a feeling that the shirt itself would get enough hastle, without her wearing different colors. She only hoped that they'd accept it, because her mother was right that one time: her brother would rip the girls uniform to shreds again if she got new ones, and the same exact thing would just repeat. She'd have to make it clear that it was the boys' uniform or no uniform. Or a completely different school, but her parents would hardly accept that.

Now, Haruka was strolling to her new school, although slightly nervously. She never did like the first day of school, because of the restrictions that her parents had in place. That was another reason as to why her parents were insane, stupid, or ignorant: they had already decided that she would be a doctor for the Sohma family exclusively (a decision made when Hatori was still alive to tell them that Haruka was hardly capable of the position, and even more encouraged now that he couldn't tell them that), and that in the field of medicine, imagination was, if anything, a hinderance, an inconvenience, a weakness. They also decided that the best way to keep an imagination from growing was to completely cut it off from anything artistic. That included writing, drawing, and music.

With that in mind, Haruka was forbidden from any kind of music except the occasional Beethoven or Bach or some other cunductor of great concertos. Furthermore, she was not allowed to draw or write, and that could be done even with a simple piece of paper and pencil. Haruka was usually lacking in classes for not being prepared, when it wasn't even her fault. She did exceptionally well for having been completely unnequipped, but she still didn't get the straight A's that her parents wanted. Haruka had a strange feeling that if she wasn't a straight-A-minus-having-stupid-parents student, her grades would be completely below what her parents wanted, and they might just fall to child abuse. Naturally, for reasons such as those, Haruka did her very best to keep her grades up.

Haruka neared the front gate of the school and sighed. The school definitely seemed quite intact, but it most certainly didn't look to be its best. There was a splash of grafiti on the front gates, which looked as though they were once painted vibrantly white but now were more of a really light gray. The school itself wasn't in such great condition either; Haruka thought that she saw a broken window on the second floor.

There was a girl leaning on the front of the gates, and the first thing that Haruka saw in her was her short orange hair. After that, Haruka saw that the girl was wearing a surgeon-like mask over her mouth and nose and a long skirt that almost reached the ground. She seemed to be about in her second year, but Haruka was more surprised at her being at school; her accessory style was very exclusive to gang members, and most of them skipped school entirely.

The girl looked up as Haruka approached. Her mask wrinkled a little in what Haruka guessed was a smile, and Haruka, deciding to be at least somewhat social, smiled nervously back—until she saw the cat at the girl's ankles.

It seemed impossibly out of place. No animal was generally allowed on school grounds, and Haruka wouldn't doubt that the rule would apply just outside the school gates as much as inside them. Also, most people with that girl's style had the teachers' most careful eyes watching them. They would have noticed the cat, and they would have been harder on her case for having a cat anywhere nearby.

The girl's smile faded with Haruka's, and she asked, "Is something wrong?"

Haruka looked up at the girl, surprised. "You mean you can't tell it's there?" The cat was the exact same color as the girl's hair, and it was rubbing its face all over the girl's ankles.

"Can't tell what's there?" the girl asked, trying to follow Haruka's gaze but apparently failing.

Haruka frowned but decided it best for her reputation that she didn't ask any further. "No, it's nothing. Never mind, forget I said anything," she sighed and kept walking into the school grounds.

The girl with the cat looked at Haruka's back as though she had two heads, but ended up shrugging and following Haruka through the entrance gates. Haruka found it strange, though, that this complete stranger was following her like a great friend; maybe she had no other friends and decided that Haruka, being the first person to smile at her, was her best chance? Haruka somehow doubted that. She wanted to find out what the girl wanted from her, and she figured that the best way to do that was to ask her to her face, so she turned around to ask. Haruka barely managed to open her mouth when someone ran into her from behind, knocking her over with her attacker landing on top of her.

_Oh shit!_ Haruka thought desperately.

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End file.
